Under the Hammer: August 25, 2016

The Associated Press (AP) has released a devastating article on the connection between Hillary Clinton while secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation. According to the AP, over half of the people – outside of government officials – that Hillary Clinton met with as secretary of state were donors to the Clinton Foundation.

The importance the Clintons place on this story is evident in the extent they went to cover it up. The story is based on Hillary Clinton’s appointment calendars recently released by the State Department. It has taken the AP three years, a lawsuit and a court order to get its hands on Hillary Clinton’s State Department calendars – items that are unquestionably public records.

The AP, like every other news organization that has wanted documents from the Clinton State Department, has had to go to court to get them. It is why her emails are only being released three years after she left office.

It doesn’t seem like the release of an appointment calendar would be a big deal. It’s a public record. Anyone should be able to file a Freedom of Information Act request and get a copy by return mail. But Hillary Clinton ran what has to have been one of the most secretive federal departments since the Freedom of Information Act was passed.

It is absurd to have to go to court to get an appointment calendar. It isn’t classified and there is no question that it is a public record. But this type of secrecy was par for the course while Hillary Clinton was in office. During the four years that she was secretary of state, her department received 240 Freedom of Information Act requests; of those a total of three were answered during the period set by law that a government agency has to respond.

It seems the reasons the information is now being released is that Hillary Clinton is no longer in charge and the employees at the State Department are not willing to go to jail to protect her secrets.

It does appear that the federal judges demanding that information from Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department are getting tired of the delaying tactics. I wouldn’t be surprising if the next time the State Department missed a court ordered deadline to produce documents that someone was held in contempt and put in jail, at least overnight, to think about the consequences of defying a federal judge.

It appears the way it worked in the Clinton State Department is if someone tried to get an appointment to see Clinton and was rebuffed through the normal channels, then, if they were big donors to the Clinton Foundation, they could get in touch with the Clinton Foundation and someone from the foundation would get in touch with Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, who would make the arrangements for the donor to meet with or talk to Hillary Clinton.

There is no way that even Hillary Clinton can claim that it was merely a coincidence that over half of her appointments were to talk to people who were major donors to the Clinton Foundation. And from Abedin’s emails, also released under court order, it is evident she was the point person for the Clinton Foundation, getting favors done for donors and, in this case, setting up appointments to see the secretary of state.

For people with big money it was cheap access to the secretary of state, and they could not only get a meeting, they got favorable treatment.

According to the AP, Clinton also met with representatives of 16 foreign governments who donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton Foundation, but AP didn’t count these in the total of 85 Clinton donors that Hillary Clinton met with because the secretary of state is expected to meet with representatives of foreign governments. The 85 donors, out of the 154 people she met with, were not representatives of foreign governments.

It is damning evidence that the Clinton Foundation was being used as a back door to gain access to and favors from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Bill Clinton has said that if Hillary Clinton wins the election he would step down from the foundation and stop all fundraising for it, and that the foundation would stop accepting donations from foreign governments and only accept donations from American citizens.

If it is a problem for the Clinton Foundation to accept money from foreign countries and foreign nationals because Hillary Clinton is president, why isn’t it a problem if she is secretary of state? It would appear that Bill Clinton is admitting that it was a problem. Why else would he now, at this late date, be promising to change the way the Clinton Foundation does business if one of the founders is holding public office?

The secretary of state is one of the most powerful positions in the federal government. Not as powerful as the president, but many see it as the second most powerful position in a presidential administration.

The mainstream media have been solidly in Hillary Clinton’s camp. For the AP to come out with such a damning article is evidence that the solid wall of unquestioned support is breaking.

If the mainstream media start doing their jobs and reporting on Hillary Clinton as they should, it will be extremely difficult for her to win in November.

The mainstream media have largely ignored, for example, the fact that Hillary Clinton has not held a press conference in 265 days. With any other candidate they would be demanding access. So far Hillary Clinton has been allowed to slide by with very little information leaking out to the public about how isolated she is.

*****

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the American people can expect the most secretive administration in modern history. She has a pattern of not wanting the American people to have access to information and now has gone one step further and refuses to hold press conferences where she can be questioned by the media.

When her husband and then President Bill Clinton put Hillary Clinton in charge of developing a national healthcare plan, it was all done in secret. Hillary Clinton refused to release documents or information about what the group was doing, claiming that the Freedom of Information Act didn’t apply to her because she was neither an elected official nor a government employee.

The courts decided differently, and after it was all over and her healthcare plan went down in flames in Congress, the information was finally released.

Much like the information coming out of the State Department now, it was only released by court order and after the fact.

By the time the information was pried out of Hillary Clinton’s hands, her healthcare plan had been overwhelmingly voted down and nobody cared that much about how she developed a healthcare plan that nobody in Congress liked. It’s a remarkable achievement to come up with a plan that everybody hates.

Perhaps, some input from the public or even from Congress would have been helpful, but that is not how Hillary Clinton operates.

*****

According to a poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times, Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a double-digit lead as other polls are reporting. The LA Times poll shows Hillary Clinton with 44 percent and Donald Trump with 44 percent.

The LA Times poll is conducted differently than other polls; instead of, “who would you vote for,” the people being polled rank their support of the candidate on a 100-point scale.

The Zogby poll reports it is a two-point race and Rasmussen is also reporting that it is a two-point race.

If these polls are anywhere close to being accurate then Hillary Clinton has cause to worry, because Trump hasn’t started advertising yet. So far the Trump campaign has spent nearly nothing on national ads. Hillary Clinton by contrast is spending millions. It is inconceivable that Trump is not going to advertise at all. My guess is that he is waiting until closer to the election when the advertising will have more effect on the actual outcome of the election.

*****

Political pundits who have been wrong about every move Trump has made since June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, are doubling down on their dire predictions for November. Or can you call it doubling down when they have already doubled down 10 or 20 times?

The Trump campaign’s imminent demise has been predicted by pundits more times than Wile E. Coyote has had the Road Runner in his grasp, and paying any attention to them makes about as much sense as betting that this time Wile E. Coyote is actually going to catch the Road Runner. The pundits don’t understand Trump because he is not a politician and they have spent their adult lives covering politicians who say anything to get elected and, once in office, will do anything to stay in office.

Trump is for once a candidate who doesn’t need the office. He probably has serious doubts about what he has gotten himself into but knows that he will be a much better president than Hillary Clinton who has accomplished very little in her career and almost nothing without the influence of her husband. She was appointed secretary of state by Obama to keep her from running against him in 2012 and while secretary of state sold her office to the highest bidder. The Clintons are both lawyers, so they may have managed to rake in millions on the power of her office without breaking the letter of the law, but they violated every moral and ethical law known to man.

What is incredible is that the whole time Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and Bill Clinton was running around the world making deals with some of the world’s most reviled leaders, the mainstream media largely ignored it. Even the mainstream media couldn’t ignore the deal to give Russia control of about 50 percent of the US uranium production. They reported it, but didn’t make a big deal out of it. The mainstream media have a penchant for that: If Republicans make a single misstep it is on the front page for weeks; if the Democrats do something far worse, like sell US uranium production to Russia for personal gain, the mainstream newspapers report it and then it is gone, never to be mentioned again.

For something to reach the consciousness of the American people it has to be repeated over and over again. If it is only mentioned once people don’t think it’s important.

For example, the shake up in the Trump campaign is being reported on incessantly. The fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign tries out new slogans all the time is reported, but where is the commentary about how if a candidate has to change her slogan constantly there are huge issues about what she stands for?

Is there a worse slogan than “I’m with Her”? Well, yes, there was during the primary; “Jeb Can Fix It” ranks up there as perhaps the worst presidential campaign slogan of all times. But right behind “Jeb Can Fix It” is “I’m with Her.”

*****

Hillary Clinton has told a lot of lies about her home basement email server that she used for all of her email communication while secretary of state. She said no classified information was sent or received, which according to FBI Director James Comey is not true. Her fallback position, and the Clintons always have a fallback position, was that no information that was classified at the time was sent or received, also untrue. Her fallback, fallback position was that no emails marked classified were sent or received – also untrue according to Comey.

But now she has an even larger problem, at least in volume. The over 30,000 personal messages on her server that, according to Hillary Clinton, were about her daughter’s wedding, her mother’s funeral and yoga, turned out not to be about that at all. The FBI managed to retrieve many of those emails, and 15,000 are about State Department business.

She said that her attorneys looked at all of the emails, which is not true. But assuming – and it is not a safe assumption that what Hillary Clinton did say about the number of emails was true – and it was about 60,000, her attorneys missed one quarter of the total number.

How do you miss one-third of the emails you’re looking for?

There is another statement Hillary Clinton makes that is annoying because it is so misleading. She says that no other secretary of state has turned over all their emails to the State Department? It’s true because the other secretaries of state have used the State Department system, so they didn’t have to turn over emails.

Those emails she turned over, the 30,000 that she claimed were the only ones dealing with State Department business, didn’t belong to Hillary Clinton. She’s not doing anyone any favors, nor is she being open turning them over to the State Department. Those emails belong to the American people and were only turned over to the State Department because of a court order.

Another way to look at it is that Hillary Clinton stole those emails from the American people and then, when she got caught, she turned some of them back in. Most of the time people don’t ask for praise when they return stolen property.

It also raises a much larger question about her attitude toward classified information. Hillary Clinton used her BlackBerry and other unsecure communication devices all over the world, including in countries known to be involved in cyber warfare against the US. By using those devices she opened the door for other countries to hack into her system. She might as well have put the emails on an open website.

It does put some of our enemies in an interesting position. There has been a lot of talk about Russian President Vladimir Putin in this presidential race. Hillary Clinton essentially gave Putin a method of affecting the outcome of the presidential election. Putin certainly has all of Hillary Clinton’s emails. It is naive to think that he doesn’t. Putin could release a bunch of damaging emails from the trove he has from Hillary Clinton’s email server, or not, depending on whom he decides would be the better US president for Russia. Hillary Clinton has given Putin a lot of power.

*****

The State Department is trying to slow walk the release of the 15,000 emails that the FBI discovered in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server that had not been turned over to the State Department as she was required by law to do.

As has been the case all along in this email scandal, the federal judges are telling the State Department it has to speed things up. Clearly, what the State Department is attempting is to delay the release until after the election, but what it may end up doing is delaying the release as long as possible and in the end releasing the emails just before the election, which would be the worst thing possible for Hillary Clinton.

The American public has a short memory. If the emails are released now, Hillary Clinton will have time to tell a dozen lies about them before the election and give her supporters reason to believe that it is all a huge right-wing conspiracy. If the emails are released the week before the election, they will dominate the news as people are voting.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to spend the week before Nov. 8 trying to explain why as secretary of state she did special favors for billionaires and corrupt government officials who made massive donations to the Clinton Foundation. It would be far better for her to get it all out now, if it can’t be held until after the election.

Federal judges are accustomed to having their orders obeyed. So far the State Department’s reluctance to release information detrimental to the Hillary Clinton campaign has pushed the patience of the judges about as far as it is wise to go. When a State Department official is hauled into court and given the choice of going to jail for contempt of court or releasing the emails, which are the property of the American people, not the State Department, it won’t bring about the kind of headline that a presidential candidate wants to see on the eve of the election. It will also be the kind of story that even the liberal media that is doing everything in its power to get Hillary Clinton elected can’t ignore.

If the State Department can manage to delay the release until after the election, that would be the best option. The second best is to get it all out there now. The worst option for Hillary Clinton is to hold on to everything until just before the election and then be forced by a federal judge to release the emails.

Hillary Clinton is not very well liked, so maybe the folks at the State Department remember being yelled at and abused by Hillary Clinton and are delaying things so they can do everything possible to make her look bad. People have done much worse to mean bosses who they thought didn’t treat them fairly.

*****

The mainstream media’s overt support of Hillary Clinton in the presidential race could bring about the end of journalism as we know it. And it puts the average citizen with access to the internet and conservative websites in the ticklish position of who to believe.

The standard has always been the major newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to name a few. Even if the news story went against everything those reporters believed in their hearts, they reported it because it was their job.

With this election, the mainstream media have decided that it should report the news in a manner that will help Hillary Clinton and hurt Trump. This is nothing new. The mainstream media have leaned left for decades. What is new is that the mainstream media are admitting, rationalizing and doing much more of it. In effect, the mainstream media have been turned loose and they don’t feel the need to pretend to report the news and let the chips fall where they may.

A recent article in The Washington Post on the emails of Huma Abedin is a wonderful example. The writers chose requests for favors from Hillary Clinton that came through the Clinton Foundation to Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin that weren’t granted.

Abedin, for a time, while working for the State Department also worked for the Clinton Foundation and a private company closely associated with the Clinton Foundation and personally for Hillary Clinton. Abedin seemed to be the point person on communications between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

But why didn’t they choose situations were favors were granted? If the reporters were behaving as journalists and not activists they would have chosen the most outrageous cases that were granted, because the secretary of state doing favors for friends and supporters is much bigger news than the secretary of state not doing favors for friends and supporters.

Journalists will write about the one car during the afternoon commute that ended up in a fiery crash killing three people and not the 500,000 cars that arrived home without incident. It is the nature of journalism and that is what makes this so scary. Without a free press you cannot have a free people. If the press itself chooses not to be free then what do you have?

Those of us who do not think that Hillary Clinton should be elected despite her lack of honesty and lack of achievement are left wondering whom to believe.

*****

It’s hard to believe that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker would say that national borders are the “worst invention ever.” Without a border you can’t have a country.

Until Europe closed down its borders, millions of refugees were streaming in from the Middle East and Northern Africa. If it is possible to scrape together the money to travel from a country where there is unending war, no jobs and scarce food, to a place where there is no war and not just jobs but free food, clothing and shelter, why would anyone choose to stay and starve or die a violent death?

I am reminded of what an American medical missionary who spent 40 years in Haiti said when a reporter asked him how many Haitians would immigrate to the US if the US opened its borders. He said, “All of them.” And he asked why anyone would stay in a country where getting enough food to survive is the goal of a large percentage of the population when they could immigrate to the US and know that food and shelter will be provided whether they can find jobs or not.

I think the same might be said about Syria right now. Why would anyone choose to stay in Syria when, if they can make a short trip across the Mediterranean, they will arrive in a country filled with milk and honey so to speak.

*****

You can’t make this stuff up. Clintonites such as James Carville are now saying that if the Clinton Foundation is shut down people will die.

In the Clinton world and the world of Factchecker.com (apparently an arm of the Democratic Party) this no doubt would rate as an absolutely 100 percent true statement, and it is. However, it is also true that if the Clinton Foundation is not shut down people will die. If the Clinton Foundation were never formed people would die and if it exists for a thousand years people will die. Statements like this are meaningless.

But to get to the heart of the matter, the Clinton Foundation in 2013 raised $140 million and spent $9 million on charitable programs. The vast majority of its revenue goes to support the Clintons and their buddies.

When Huma Abedin needed a job, the Clinton Foundation put her on the payroll for a six-figure salary for part-time work. When the Clintons’ friends need jobs, the Clinton Foundation provides. It is an employment agency for rich effete snobs and for Arkansas rednecks who supported Bill Clinton back when he was the governor of a small, poor, Southern state.

The Clinton Foundation doesn’t do charitable work like most foundations. It organizes big events and arranges big crowds to feed Bill Clinton’s sizable ego.

When you can only travel by private jet like the Clintons, and you travel all the time, it gets expensive.

*****

The Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, give verbal support to the theory of global warming and support the US reducing its carbon footprint. But they live their lives as if burning fossil fuels makes no difference, never mind the expense.

Hillary Clinton flew on a private jet 20 miles from Martha’s Vineyard to Nantucket for a campaign fundraiser.

*****

“Don’t believe everything you read about Hillary Clinton’s health on Google,” reads the headline in The Washington Post, which is all in in its support of Hillary Clinton for president.

The headline could read, “Don’t believe everything you read about Donald Trump on Google.” Or even better, “Don’t believe everything you read about anything on Google.”

The article reads like it was written by the Clinton campaign, giving the same tired old reasons for her publicly admitted health issues. She got dehydrated and fell over and hit her head, but they said it was no big deal. However, lots of people fall, hit their heads and don’t have to wear those weird glasses for people with double vision.

Her husband Bill Clinton said, “They went to all this trouble to say she had staged what was a terrible concussion that required six months of very serious work to get over,” he said. “It’s something she never low-balled with the American people, never tried to pretend it didn’t happen.”

A normal bump on the noggin doesn’t take six months of hard work to recover from. But then maybe the statement by Bill Clinton was one of those from a Google search that The Washington Post wants us to ignore.

And that wasn’t the only time she has fallen and hurt herself so badly that it had to be made public. She also fell and broke her elbow.

Most adults in their 60s don’t have to hold on to something to stand up. But from videos of Hillary Clinton it appears she does. Vice President Joe Biden caught her as she stumbled at the podium recently.

Perhaps The Washington Post could inform its readers why she has not held a press conference in 265 days; it is extremely unusual for a presidential candidate not to hold press conferences. Or why her campaign schedule is so lacking in public appearances; that might be because of her inability to attract a crowd, but it could be because of health concerns.

I would have been very interested to read about the videos circulating that make Hillary Clinton appear that she has suddenly lost control of her head and it wobbles all over the place. Are these actual videos or did someone create them with Photoshop? If they are real, she has a problem but The Washington Post doesn’t bother to tell its readers whether those are real or not.

*****

I was reading in Partners in Crime, by Jerome Corsi, about the deal that ended up with Russia controlling over 50 percent of US uranium production and that made Bill Clinton’s friend Frank Giustra billions of dollars. The whole deal started with Bill Clinton going with Giustra to Kazakhstan and getting Giustra an appointment with the head of state.

It’s pretty unseemly for the former president of the United States to be going around selling his influence to the highest bidder, but it’s not illegal. It’s not likely Bill Clinton would have ever been elected president if he had told the American people that after serving for eight years he planned to travel around the world and sell his influence to the highest bidder.

It’s pretty slimy, but Bill Clinton is a pretty slimy guy. If there was any doubt about his nature, the absolute undeniable fact that he did have sex with Monica Lewinsky and the fact that he denied it to the American people proves it.

There is no law against being disreputable but there is a law against using the power and influence of the US government for personal gain. Hillary Clinton happened to be secretary of state and did favors for Kazakhstan. If Hillary Clinton approved one dime, or gave Kazakhstan one concession to help her husband’s friend complete a business deal, then she should go to jail.

The fact that it hasn’t been investigated already is because the money to the Clintons was laundered through the Clinton Foundation – and that’s exactly the right word. The Clintons collect money from all over the world for influence peddling, then they launder it through the Clinton Foundation, put tens of millions in their own pockets and hand out more tens of millions to friends.

*****

It’s incredible how the news shapes our beliefs. Because of all I’ve read about the disastrous presidential race of Barry Goldwater when he was defeated by Lyndon Johnson, I thought it must have been the worst defeat in modern times.

It wasn’t even close. Goldwater received 52 Electoral College votes, which is pretty awful because Johnson had 486. No doubt, Goldwater got clobbered.

But how do you explain the 1980 race between Ronald Reagan and incumbent President Jimmy Carter? On Election Day, some pundits were saying it was too close to call, others that Reagan had a slight edge. At the end of the night Carter suffered a worse defeat than Goldwater. Carter received 49 Electoral College votes to 489 for Reagan.

And then there was Walter Mondale in the 1984 race, who received 13 Electoral College votes to 525 for Reagan. I never read about how Mondale ran the worst presidential race in history, but I see Goldwater referred to with some frequency.

*****

Obama said he didn’t go to Louisiana earlier because he didn’t want to go down there just for a photo op. So the question is, why did he go down there right after his vacation was over? We all know it is just a photo op.

There is no reason for a president to go to a disaster area except to see and be seen; that is the definition of a photo op. Aid is not going to get to people any quicker because Air Force One landed. He no doubt could have done just as much if not more to help people by making a few phone calls.

It has become a tradition for presidents to go to disaster sites, but it’s not to help people, it is to have their photos taken hugging disaster victims.

President George W. Bush was widely criticized for not flying to Louisiana immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck, even though he was there three days later.

Isn’t it interesting that the mainstream media are making excuses for Obama finishing out his vacation, getting in that last round of vacation golf and then flying down for his photo op?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

COMMENT

Name *

Email *

Website

you MUST enable javascript to be able to comment

About Us

The Rhino has had a long tradition of providing news in Guilford County. The original Rhinoceros Times, founded in 1991, went out of business in May 2013. Snap Publications revived the herbivorous beast and in October 2013, the all-new and improved Rhino Times was started.

On November 15, 2018, the last printed edition of the Rhino Times came off the presses leaving the world of print journalism behind and moving into the future with an e-paper. Readers of The Rhino Times will be able to rely on rhinotimes.com for daily coverage and opinions of Greensboro while gaining insider access to important Guilford County work sessions and events. The new online platform allows readers to connect and interact with each other as well as the journalists.